'Like he was traumatized as a child while reading Black Beauty?' I said.
Susan smiled, which was always lovely to see. When she smiled her whole self went into it and the tone of her body changed and her coloration livened. 'It's usually not that simple, but you have the idea. Given the fear level that must be operating, it could even be that they are so unlike what they symbolize.'
'The guy's killed three women; it's hard to sympathize with his fear,' I said.
'Yes,' Susan said. 'But it's worth understanding. Might be worth looking at the bondage. Is it the same in each case? Might it be ritualistic?'
'Is there any way to predict what he'll do next?'
'It's what shrinks do worst,' Susan said. 'We're pretty good at explaining human behavior but we're an embarrassment at predicting it.'
'He'll probably kill another black woman,' I said.
'Probably,' Susan said. 'And he'll probably write more letters and eventually you'll catch him.'
'Maybe,' I said.
'You will,' she said. 'You're smart and you're tough and your will is absolutely inexhaustible.'
'Well,' I said, 'that's true.'
'And I'm going to help you,' Susan said.
The timer rang in my kitchen and I got up and went and took the rice out of the oven. I cracked the cover on the casserole so steam could escape, and shut off the oven and turned toward Susan across the counter.
'We are faced with a decision,' I said. 'I can have supper on the table in ten minutes and we could eat heartily and then fall into bed. But knowing how, as you age, you are inclined toward torpor after a meal, I was wondering how you wished to deal with the question of me jumping on your bones.'
Susan had half a glass of champagne and Midori left. She raised it toward the light and gazed through it for a moment and then she drank half of it and lowered the glass and looked at me thoughtfully. Her eyes were so large and dark that they seemed all pupil, as if the iris had disappeared.
'What's for supper?' she said.
'Grilled lemon and rosemary chicken, brown rice with pignolias, assorted fresh vegetables lightly steamed and dressed with Spenser's famous honey-mustard splash, blue corn bread, and a bottle of Iron Horse Chardonnay.'
Susan drank the rest of her champagne and leaned forward and put the glass on the coffee table and stood up. She stepped out of the cowboy boots, and unsnapped the leather pants and wiggled out of them and folded them neatly across the back of the wing chair. Then she turned and looked full at me and smiled with all of her energy and said, 'I believe it would be best if you jumped on my bones now.'
'I knew you'd say that,' I said.
'When did you first suspect?' she said. a 'When you took your pants off,' I said.
'Yes,' Susan murmured, her face against mine, 'that would be suggestive.'
I put my arms around her. 'You know what I miss?' I said. 'I miss the old days, before pantyhose, when there were garter belts and the flash of thigh above a stocking top.'
'Ah, sweet bird of youth,' Susan said with her mouth against mine.
'But I'll manage,' I said.
And I did.
Later we ate dinner, Susan in one of my blue oxford shirts and me in a pair of stretch-fabric workout pants, the kind with the drawstring at the top. We looked dashing.
'How about therapy?' I said. 'Should I start checking shrinks?'
She shook her head. There was a drop of vegetable dressing on her chin and I leaned over and daubed with my napkin. 'He probably wouldn't seek therapy,' Susan said. 'He wouldn't need to, his needs are being fulfilled by the crime. People seek help when they are frustrated, when the pressure is too great to bear.'
'Just like me,' I said. 'Whenever the pressure of tumescence becomes intolerable, I seek you out.'
'How lovely to think of it that way,' Susan said.
'Well, I'm also motivated by the fact that I love you more than it is possible to say.'
'I know,' Susan said. 'I feel the same about you.'
For a moment we were silent, and the connection between us was shimmering and palpable and more changeless than the universe. I raised my wineglass slightly. 'Forever,' I said.
Her eyes glistened as she looked at me.
'Probably,' she said.
Red Rose did it again on a wet April day, with the snow finally gone and the slim gold of nature's first green beginning to edge out on some of the shrubs. Dolores Taylor had been an exotic dancer. This one was a singer. Her name was Chantelle, and she played piano and sang in the cocktail lounge of a hotel out near the airport. She'd been killed in one of the hotel rooms and found in the morning by a maid, who was still incoherent from shock.
When Quirk and I got there, there was press of every species jammed into the corridor outside what I heard one television reporter call 'the death room.' Television lights glared. A big-bellied, red-nosed, thick-necked cop in
